This pictorial confronts the urgent need to shift design practices in response to the past and ongoing destruction of habitat structures and the resulting losses of biodiversity. To do this, it illustrates the first iteration of I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin: an architectural installation that endeavours to support coexistence between local insects, fungi, and humans. The installation is an outcome of the workshop “Interspecies Exploration by Bio- Digital Manufacturing Technologies” during the first part of the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summer Camp (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, August 2022). The 9-day workshop brought together a group of four organisers and nine selected participants to engage with the challenges of designing for and with other living beings. Aiming to develop novel approaches to creating urban habitat structures, the workshop involved parametric design, clay 3D printing, mycelium-based composites, and freeform crocheting. We explored questions of interspecies design by prototyping objects iteratively while conversing and reflecting. Our discussion lists the insights we gained from this process of collaborative and critical making. We offer suggestions for involving a range of human and nonhuman stakeholders in design; reflect on practical and ethical questions when working with living materials; identify challenges of foregrounding nonhuman needs while dealing with technical or logistical constraints; and outline ways to approach the complexity of intervening in ecosystems. These considerations may help inform the future work of designers who want to integrate the perspectives of multiple species into their designs. As a living laboratory undergoing continual monitoring, I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin provides a useful foundation for developing further iterations and a community that exceeds the duration of the camp. 

Horticultural practices are increasingly entering the private realm due to the popularity of urban gardening, indoor gardening systems, and architectural propositions to join living spaces for people and vegetable cultivation in order to promote more resilient and sustainable ways of living. While new research into symbiotic processes between living organisms and their ability to sense and reason triggers new works of art, culture, design, and architecture, the organisation of indoor plants remains mainly unaffected. This is due to the fact that many of the examples that aim to bring together people and plants in an architectural context are characterised by rigid materials and technical systems that separate people and plants from each other and feature relatively unnatural environments, compositions, and expressions. In proposing an alternative perspective on this, On Textile Farming explores textiles as flexible systems for integrating plant growth in textile materials. The collaboration with AB Ludvig Svensson, a developer and producer of textiles for interiors and greenhouses, involved a joint approach to the two distinct areas of climate screens and interior textiles. Through experimental methods, interactions between plants and textiles were explored using double-weave structures to integrate seeds and substrate. A methodological framework is proposed wherein the processes and materials of textile and spatial design open up for environmental parameters, e.g. changes in time, climate, and material behaviour. The design concepts ‘textile permeability’, ‘seasonal textiles’, and ‘textile climate’ describe the interactions between plants, textiles, and space, and can be seen as first steps towards an interior textile ecosystem in which spaces are composed of relationships between biotic and abiotic components, causing the natural and the artificial to intersect. ‘Spatial permeability’, ‘seasonal interiors’ and ‘spatial climates’ expand the three textile concepts towards space and describe interactions between different spatial qualities that were explored through autobiographical research; for this, an experimental house was built in a rural region of Sweden and lived in. In this context, textiles be-came flexible interfaces between the inside and the outside, guiding growth and melting into seasonal expressions that blurred nature and artifice.

Alongside with smart materials, biomaterials become increasingly available to the field of textile design. This biological paradigm brings an alternative perspective to the ways in which textiles can be designed, present themselves, and can be dealt with. As biomaterials such as plants and bacteria thrive in symbiosis with their environment, their ecosystem consequently becomes disposable to the expressions of textiles and interior spaces. Here, textiles could take on the role of a mediator for ecosystem services, e.g. guiding the growth of crops, regulating indoor climates and supporting the decomposition of waste. This research aims to explore what the design of a ‘textile interior ecosystem’ would be like and discusses what the role of textiles as accommodating biological processes in relation to this system could be. By experimental research, ‘On Textile Farming’ explores the design of ‘textile interior ecosystem’ investigating e.g. growing crops, composting and fermenting in interior spaces in order to speculate how these biological principles could be translated into the design of textiles and how this would change the way we form interior spaces, live with them and understand them - as a community of living systems. By embedding biological agents e.g. plants and bacteria into interior fabrics, a biological perspective is added to their life-cycle. Here, the role of the textile is opened up towards a substrate for biological agents, a template for growth and a mediator in between all actors involved in the ‘textile interior ecosystem’. As a result, this research presents speculative scenarios which exemplify the extended life-cycle, illustrate the increase in interior diversity and forms of habitation using textiles, from an aesthetic and functional point of view. In a time in which the way we handle relationships to biotic and abiotic components is discussed and criticised, ‘On Textile Farming’ could open up a range of concepts unfamiliar to designing textiles and spaces, such as ‘Seasonal Interiors’, ’Multispecies Interplay’ and ‘Textile Hortitecture’.

Presently, designing with living systems such as insects, fungi and bacteria has become an area of extended interest, proposing collaborative processes of designing and manufacturing - as a solution for symbiotic ways of living. On the scale of the interior, modern systems for interior gardening, combining both functional, e.g., food supply, purifying the air, and aesthetic values, experience exceptional popularity, ensuring a complementary perspective on horticultural landscapes indoors. As a result, the spaces where people live and crops grow increasingly intersect and therefore open

up for developments that bridge both areas and where aesthetic perspectives become equally important. However, modern indoor gardening systems are shaped by commercial horticultural practices, bringing reservoirs such as buckets, tubs or tanks, mostly built of plastic, into the homes. Textile Farming aims to explore alternative forms of plant organisation by blending seeds and textile structures into a hybrid material for textile interior scenarios. Consequently the materials’ performative capacity becomes part of the textile design process. A foundational part are forms of human management, e.g. activation of the seeds, maintenance of the plants, interaction with the hybrid textile structures within and beyond interiors, that leads to experiences and expressions. By practice based design research and through a series of design examples that explore the transformative potential of seeds in textile structures, alternative forms of plant organisation and methods for the textile design process lead to scenarios that propose alternatives to how we live with and organise plants today.

This research explores the dynamic qualities of plant degradation in textile structures for interior and aims to develop alternative aesthetics, interactions, life–cycles and applications for living with plants by referring to outdoor expressions and experiences. A series of material explorations illustrates the potential of corn seeds in textile indoor applications, focusing on aesthetics and material properties of degradation to create an interplay of texture, structure, form and color. The hybrid textiles refer to Blaisse view on curtains as fluid atmospheres and second skin, challenging the static nature of architecture and reinforcing the dialogue between landscape and interior. Bringing aesthetics of decay into interior spaces not only challenges the nature of materials, it also invites to rethink the aesthetic and cultural bias towards natural processes in interior scenarios.